Target Product Profiles in Plant Breeding
Ganga Rao Nadigatla, Harish Gandhi, Agnes Mbugua
Introduction
In modern plant breeding, success is no longer measured solely by yield improvements. The complexity of global markets, regional growing conditions, and diverse end-user demands necessitate a more structured and market-oriented breeding strategy. A critical tool in this approach is the Target Product Profile (TPP), a strategic framework that guides breeders in the development of new crop varieties by clearly defining the market requirements they must meet.
What is a Target Product Profile?
A Target Product Profile (TPP) serves as a blueprint for breeders, outlining the key traits and performance benchmarks required for a new product to succeed in a specific market segment. It ensures alignment between the breeding objectives and the needs of growers, processors, and consumers. Each TPP is tailored to a distinct market segment and captures both agronomic and market-related traits.
The standard TPP template includes:
• Required traits
• Measurement scales for each trait
• Minimum threshold scores
• Trait prioritization (essential vs. nice-to-have)
• Breeding objective for each trait (improvement or maintenance)
• Seed production/multiplication requirements
• Traits necessary for product registration
• Benchmarking against current market-leading products
This structured approach helps teams make informed decisions during parent selection and product advancement stages.
Classification of Traits
Traits within a TPP are organized into several categories based on their significance and role in the breeding process:
• Essential Traits: Must be present in all new products for the market segment. They are critical to meeting or exceeding stakeholder expectations (e.g., disease resistance, yield stability).
• Improve Traits: A subset of essential traits that are actively targeted for enhancement through breeding. For example, improving drought tolerance or increasing protein content.
• Threshold Traits: Another subset of essential traits, but here the goal is to maintain current levels rather than improve them, ensuring continuity of performance (e.g., established disease resistance levels).
• Nice to Have Traits: Traits that add value but are not mandatory for the product to succeed in the market. Their inclusion can provide a competitive edge but is not essential (e.g., aesthetic appeal, niche taste preferences).
Design and Application of TPPs
The TPP template is intentionally designed to enable cross-comparison within crops, allowing breeders to quickly assess how different market segments vary in trait requirements. This supports a more refined breeding pipeline where resources can be allocated efficiently.
Key Applications:
• Product Advancement: TPPs are used at every stage of product development to ensure alignment with market needs. Product advancement also creates a platform to review current TPPs to ensure they are up to date with market dynamics.
[Drylands crops elevating product design team’s role toward impactful product selection | GloMIP] (https://glomip.cgiar.org/market-intelligence-bulletin/drylands-crops-elevating-product-design-teams-role-toward-impactful-product-selection)
• Parent Selection: Facilitates the selection of breeding parents that possess the desired traits.
• Market Differentiation: Helps identify traits that can distinguish one product from another within or across segments.
Challenges in TPP Development
• One of the key challenges in developing effective TPPs is the lack of complete or reliable information on some traits. In many cases, decisions must be made based on available data, even when it is limited or incomplete. This creates a level of uncertainty in the initial versions of a TPP.
• To address this issue, the TPP design process is inherently iterative. As knowledge gaps are identified, they are actively fed back to the Market Intelligence team, who are responsible for gathering additional insights, whether through grower feedback, processor surveys, agronomic studies, or market analysis.
• This ongoing feedback loop ensures that the TPP is continuously refined and remains aligned with evolving market needs. It also reinforces the collaborative nature of TPP development, requiring input from multiple disciplines and a willingness to adapt as new information becomes available. For example, the Market intelligence team did work on groundnuts market in Tanzania through concept testing, the results of this work informed the traits prioritization in the respective TPPs.
[Market Segments for Groundnuts: Recent Insights from Tanzania | GloMIP] (https://glomip.cgiar.org/market-intelligence-bulletin/market-segments-for-groundnuts-recent-insights-from-tanzania)
Iterative Process of TPP Design
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Developing a Functional TPP
A robust TPP begins with a well-defined market segment. If the segment is too broad, the trait list becomes excessively long and unfocused, risking the omission of key requirements. Conversely, if it is too narrow, there may be insufficient differentiation between products, reducing the strategic value of the TPP.
To develop an effective TPP:
• Engage a multidisciplinary team: Involve experts from breeding, seed production, regulatory affairs, marketing, and customer relations to capture a comprehensive view of product requirements.
• Incorporate market intelligence: Use data on competitor products, customer feedback, and regional agronomic trends to inform trait prioritization.
• Ensure adaptability: While the TPP serves as a guiding framework, it should be revisited and revised as market dynamics evolve.
Conclusion
Target Product Profiles provide a disciplined, market-driven approach to plant breeding. By defining clear goals based on real-world demands, TPPs help breeders focus their efforts, streamline decision-making, and ultimately deliver better, more competitive products to the market. Their strategic use ensures that new varieties not only perform well in the field but also succeed in the hands of farmers, processors, and consumers alike. For more information, TPPs can be accessed on [GloMIP] (https://glomip.cgiar.org/target-product-profiles).